Editor’s note: Mark Whicker has been a sports columnist in Southern California for 27 years. This is his first weekly Sunday column for the Los Angeles News Group.

Clayton Kershaw was the National League’s Pitcher of the Month and threw a no-hitter at Colorado.

Yasiel Puig is hitting .312 and headed for the All-Star Game.

Dee Gordon is leading the league in steals.

Next time you see Fred Claire, catch him up with all that.

“People ask me about the Dodgers all the time,” said Claire, who lives in Pasadena. “I have to tell them I don’t know.”

He has a general idea, but, like most of us, no compelling visual evidence. Claire worked for the Dodgers for 29 years, after he covered them for the Press-Telegram. When they last won the World Series, in 1988, he was the general manager.

But unless Claire retreats to his second home in the desert, where he can get Time Warner Cable SportsNet, he is as helpless to watch the Dodgers’ Zero Dark 2014 as the rest of us.

For the first time, the Dodgers will not show one single game over the air. And even in areas served by Time Warner, the games are not often shown by cable and satellite carriers.

Broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaime Jarrin don’t get the Dodgers. Organist Nancy Bea Hefley doesn’t get the Dodgers. Seventy percent of the area doesn’t get the Dodgers. Nobody really gets why.

You have heard the arguments, especially from DirecTV, which refuses to accept Time Warner’s demand of $4 to $5 per subscribing household. But even if the parties were inclined to agree, larger forces are at work. AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV and Comcast’s merger with Time Warner must be approved by Washington.

Meanwhile, Dodger fans pray for a no-hitter or some other dramatic anomaly that will be picked up on the fly by the MLB Network, like the no-hitters by Kershaw and Josh Beckett, Those provided confirmation that the club was still wearing blue.

An average of 52,000 viewers caught Kershaw’s no-walk, 15-strikeout no-hitter live on Time Warner, although it swelled to 92,000 in the late innings. Last year on Fox Sports, the Dodgers lured an average of 220,000.

This can’t be what advertisers had in mind. “It’s a situation that can cause a lot of heartburn,” said Roger Beahm, who teaches marketing at Wake Forest University. “The advertisers have to find other avenues because they’re not getting the reach or the frequency they hoped for.”

Beahm points out that advertisers are usually compensated in situations like this. But will the ad agencies be so eager next year?

The Dodgers themselves don’t seem panicked. Their radio ratings have exploded, primarily because the radio is the only source for Scully, at least for three innings. Attendance hit 2 million in the Dodgers’ 43rd home date and projects to 3.741 million, slightly below last season.

But Claire worries about the retirement-home inhabitants who looked forward to gathering around their friend Vin every night after dinner. And the kids who are just discovering baseball and are lured, by default, by a magnetic center fielder in Anaheim. The Angels’ ratings on Fox Sports are also significantly higher than in 2013.

“You think about the connections that are missing, the allegiances that were once forming,” Claire said. “I think it’s a concern.”

It is possible to find the Dodgers in places where everybody knows your name, but call ahead. On Monday night in Seal Beach, an Irish establishment had Time Warner. “Time to turn up the sweet voice of Vin,” said the bartender, hoping to drown out the Yankee game on ESPN.

But another Irish place, perhaps a 15-minute jog away, did not carry the Dodgers. “DirecTV,” said the woman who was serving. “If we change, we lose the football.”

She was referring to the NFL Sunday Ticket package that fills the seats from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. throughout the fall. It is exclusive to DirecTV and, for many proprietors, is too precious to lose just to pick up the Dodgers. Besides, baseball isn’t really a party sport.

On Second Street in Long Beach, also known as Breathalyzer Boulevard, a well-established sports bar was showing eight major-league games, none of them Dodgers. A few doors down, the Dodgers were playing, in front of a larger, louder clientele, although few revelers were actually watching — you know, kind of like a live Dodgers game.

But it is easy to forget that Dodger TV, as a given, is a relatively new thing.

The Brooklyn Dodgers showed most of their home games on TV, and owner Walter O’Malley thought it wounded his attendance. When the Dodgers and Giants moved west in 1958, the Dodgers only showed their games in San Francisco, an agreement O’Malley made with Giants owner Horace Stoneham.

Scully was a radio presence then. All the transistor radios in Dodger Stadium turned the place into Scully’s loudspeaker. As the years progressed, the Dodgers expanded their road presence, showing Sunday games, but even in 1975 they telecast only 21 games.

On July 17, 1964, an experiment called Subscription TV telecast its first game from Dodger Stadium. Fans could buy the game for $1.50. The Dodgers beat the Cubs, 3-2, and the announcers were Frank Sims, who later became the Angels’ traveling secretary, and former front office executive Fresco Thompson.

It only reached a 4-square-mile area, and Subscription TV was later sued. By the time the California Supreme Court ruled in its favor, it was out of business.

Various cable channels established beachheads at the stadium. “ON TV,” with Eddie Doucette, became the forerunner to Prime Ticket and then Fox Sports, but even in 1999 you could only see the Dodgers 46 times on the road and 35 times at home.

Somehow we did not feel entitled to see everything they did, as we do today. That is why the Dodgers/Time Warner impasse is so disruptive for so many.

You mean we can see Costa Rica-Uruguay in the World Cup, 30 college basketball games every Saturday, every single NBA and NHL playoff game, all-day coverage of Wimbledon and the PGA Tour, the minor-league NASCAR tour and even a high school slam-dunk contest … and not the Dodgers?

Relief is looming. Provided the Dodgers begin playing up to their price tag, they will be in the playoffs. And then everyone can watch.

Until then, the summer of ’14 will be remembered as the time when the Dodgers, and their partners in profit, separated the You from the Tube.

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